"So if I do what I want to, it'll confuse hell out of him. It may give
us an advantage. And we'll certainly learn something."

"It's worth a try." Pink looked at Jerry, his closest friend. "I'll
send Silver to do it," he said.

Jerry shook his lean head. "This is my baby, Pink." Then he opened the
door and went out, closing it behind him.

Pinkham said levelly, "Daley, come here." He whispered the plan into his
lieutenant's ear. Daley said admiringly, "Good deal. And I think that's
sense--he can't know much about the ship. I'll bet he was hiding in that
bottle, casing Sparks's equipment and learning how to operate it. The
quick look he got at the rest of us on our jobs before he started
playing hob must have given him the barest, scantiest idea of things. So
Jerry's notion could work."

"Or it could blow up," said Pink dismally. "Go tell the others. Whisper
it, in case our guest is in here." He struggled briefly with his deepest
feelings. "Don't tell Circe. We can't be sure of her yet."

"Roger." Daley left him alone at the intercom. Pinkham set the dial to
show the large room toward which Jerry was making his way....

Somewhere beyond their ken, the incredible beast from the void made
another decision, or tried another experiment; and the life-scanner
flickered into working order again. Joe Silver saw it first. Its screen
blinked, then its alarm buttons glowed vividly. Without the ship, at a
vast distance but approaching rapidly, were an untold number of organic
entities, life-sources that reacted upon the scanner like approaching
aircraft on a radar set. They could be spaceships, slugjet suits, or
anything that contained the intangible thing called life. And the sister
ships of the _Elephant's Child_ were still too far away to register.

"Great Jupiter!" bellowed Joe Silver, pointing. "What now?"

CHAPTER VIII

O. O. Jerry Jones crept along the last ramp. Why the devil was he
skulking like this? Habit, he grinned ruefully to himself; the habit of
primitive man who crouched and slunk in the presence of danger, no
matter what kind.

And the old preservation instinct was also giving him all sorts of
reasons to knock this silly business off, and go back to the protection,
however illusory, of the control room. For instance, said the sly
instinct, if this alien is telepathic, as you so neatly proved to
yourself, then doesn't he know all that you and your pals know about a
spaceship?

Shut up, Jerry